Capella (ship, 1961)
 The capella in front right next to the Denebola
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The cargo ship Capella was a coastal cargo ship of the type Kümo 840 of the Deutsche Seereederei Rostock (DSR) , which from 1952 was responsible for the entire ship operation in the foreign trade of the GDR . In 1976, the ship's sinking made international headlines.
The ship until 1976
The Capella was launched in 1961 at the Peene shipyard in Wolgast and was put into service on May 25, 1961. It was used in international coastal shipping .
The shipwreck
On January 3, 1976, a hurricane swept across Central Europe; this was one of the strongest hurricanes of the 20th century. It caused great damage and killed 82 people in Europe. This hurricane was later called the Capella hurricane .
The Capella was under the command of Captain Hentschel with salt and feed on the voyage from Runcorn, England, to Stockholm, Sweden, via the Kiel Canal . In Runcorn, on December 30, 1975, at around 2:30 p.m., the ship passed Landsend on New Years and on January 2, 1976 the Capella sailed in the English Channel at Hastings . On January 3, around 8:27 am, the Capella's captain asked for help via Radio Scheveningen. At around 10:00 a.m., the master reported that the rudder system had failed in the sea area off Schiermonnikoog , that the ship was lying across the sea and that water inrushes would occur. It was refused to hide the crew by the KNRM lifeboat Carlot , which rushed to help at around 10 a.m. The DSR ship Nienburg and the Swedish ship Laidaue (Laitaure IMO 6409727) also rushed to help. After an emergency repair, the crew tried to reach the protective port of Borkum . In Hubertgatt the ship got into extremely heavy ground lakes with wind speeds of around 150 km / h , which again damaged the cover of the survey hatch and the ship took in so much water that the pumps were unable to cope. This probably caused the pumps to fail first and then the machine. Unable to maneuver and without propulsion, the Capella capsized at around 6:23 p.m. and sank. The ship Nienburg accompanying the Capella was able to establish a line connection to a lifeboat, but it turned out that it was empty. An immediately initiated search operation with two rescue cruisers and a helicopter was unsuccessful; it was massively hindered by the falling darkness and by ground lakes. All eleven crew members remained at sea.
The wreck of the Capella is at position 53 ° 38 ′ N , 6 ° 13 ′ E. about 18 nautical miles from Borkum at a depth of 24 m on the starboard side. After the sinking, the Stasi tried to secure the ship's documents for the V case and to recover the corpses of the crew, and commissioned the West German company Lutomsky to do this.
literature
- Hans-Hermann Diestel: Ship accidents of the German shipping company Rostock . 1st edition. Hinstorff Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-356-02170-7 .
- Jan Eik, Klaus Behling: Lock thing: The greatest secrets of the GDR . 1st edition. Das Neue Berlin, 2008, ISBN 978-3-360-01944-8 .
- Otto Bönisch, Harry Wenzel, Joachim Stübner: DSR-Lines: the German shipping company Rostock . 1st edition. Koehler, 1996, ISBN 978-3-7822-0676-1 .
- Edgar Stötzer: Long Stockings & Blue Neckerchief: I was a child of socialism . 1st edition. tredition, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8495-8336-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Manfred Neumann, Dietrich Strobel: From the cutter to the container ship . Ships from GDR shipyards in text and images, 1st edition, VEB Verlag Technik, Berlin 1981.
- ↑ Heinrich Kruhl: Sturmflut-Wetterlagen in January 1976. In: The coast, no. 30, pp. 25–51. 1977
- ↑ Edgar Stötzer: Long Stockings & Blue Neckerchief: I was a child of socialism . Pp. 201-205. 2014
- ↑ Report on the accident and sinking of the DSR cargo ship MS Capella. Retrieved February 12, 2020 .
- ↑ Remained at sea. Retrieved February 12, 2020 .
- ^ Report by IME Klaus about investigations on the wreck of the DSR cargo ship MS Capella. Retrieved February 12, 2020 .
- ↑ "Report on diving examinations", BStU